Wednesday, December 3, 2014

Over the years I’ve been keeping an eye out for old
Christmas essays, but I’ve found only a few. Both Alexander Smith and G. K. Chesterton
wrote essays called “Christmas,” but the former hasn’t aged well, and the
latter, while charming in its wit, is at core a lament and an argument against
extending the celebration back into November, as we are doing here and as our
consumer culture has done irreversibly. Hilaire Belloc unsurprisingly remembers
better Christmases in “A Remaining Christmas,” and shares some insights about tradition and ritual and,
on the other hand, divisiveness in society. Charles Lamb, who often wrote
on/about holidays (“New Year’s Eve,” “Valentine’s Day,” “All Fools’ Day”), never made it to
Christmas, and Joseph Addison, writing as the Spectator
(no. 269), brought us only brief reflections on Christmas via his imaginary
friend Sir Roger De Coverley. Scant references to the holiday appear here and
there (twice in Montaigne’s Essays, each time as stand-in for “winter”
and “cold weather”), yet it would seem that during the preceding centuries, most
essayists took the holidays off.

All
this preamble will, I hope, serve a double function. First, I am keen to learn;
if you know of another classical essay about Christmas, please let me know in
the comments. Second, I want to share an essay that’s indirectly “about”
Christmas, which I think most people don’t know, and which I love: Louise
Imogen Guiney’s “On a Pleasing Encounter with a Pickpocket.”

The plot of the essay is simple: on December 21, 1892, while
walking home, Guiney, a struggling Boston poet and postmistress, was
pickpocketed and lost some money (payment for some poems) that she’d been
hoping to use to pay back a loan and buy presents for her family. But what
interests me is her response(s) to the event, which aligns well not only with
the seasonal timing but with the Adventine spirit of self-improvement.

The theft caused some consternation, as you might expect. We
know this because Guiney wrote a letter to her friend Sonny Day (the
photographer who gave us the image above), lamenting:

I write in a melancholy mood. My pocket was picked
yesterday…. As for the cash, it is gone, and I have
such respect for the inevitable that I would say nothing of it except that it
happens to concern you, and Johnny too. George Norton’s bill, a five…was in
that bag; and the other five I meant to send you as the last considerable
fragment of what I owed you in francs of France. Besides that there were $4.00
extra of my hard-earned own, to be devoted to little Christmas gifts.

Even here she seems resigned, stoical, yet she describes her
mood as melancholic, which suits an essayist just fine, but perhaps doesn’t
suit the essay. Who wants to read a sob story seeking sympathy? No, in order to
essay the experience, she’d have to
find or make some other meaning from it. So when she set pen to paper a second
time, intending public consumption, she made fun of her distractedness (“I was
in town the other evening, walking by myself, at my usual rapid pace, and
ruminating, in all likelihood, on the military affairs of the Scythians” she
began), and in describing the thief’s ingenious method of escape (no spoilers
here), she paused “overcome, nay, transported with admiration and unholy
sympathy!” declaring the maneuver “the prettiest trick imaginable.” After the
necessary and ineffectual dealings with police, she continued on her way,
conversing with Marcus Aurelius, who pipes his wisdom about honor and
self-vexing and imperturbability. “Methinks I have ‘arrived’” Guiney concludes,
“I have attained a courteous composure proof against mortal hurricanes.”

It is my contention that the very process of essaying
combined with and enhanced the writer’s natural (or hard-won) proclivities to
bring her to this resolute, peaceful, even wise response, allowing her to “make
love to the inevitable” as she says, and I recommend her Christmastime essay here,
for your benefit, sure that what Phillip Lopate promises—

The
self-consciousness and self-reflection that essay writing demands cannot help
but have an influence on the personal essayist’s life.

— works when we read
essays, too.

*

Patrick Madden once took a stroll, in the dead of winter and through shin-high slush, to the very place where Louise Imogen Guiney was pickpocketed (corner of Berkeley and Chandler in Boston). He left a dollar bill hanging temptingly out of his pocket and hoped for the best, but nobody, not even the biting wind, took the bait. When not seeking pickpockets, he teaches at Brigham Young University and Vermont College of Fine Arts. He's published one book of essays, Quotidiana, and has another on the way, Sublime Physick, plus an anthology, After Montaigne: Contemporary Essayists Cover the Essays, which he co-edited with David Lazar, also forthcoming. He curates the online anthology of classical essays www.quotidiana.org.

8 comments:

I definitely plan to check this essay out-- it sounds great. But doesn't Charles Lamb have a Christmas essay? "A Few Words on Christmas?" I remember I stumbled upon it online a few years ago, and I feel like I remember you and I discussing it briefly on Facebook. But now I'm wondering if the essay was misattributed to him? Or if I imagined a Facebook conversation with you.

Regardless, Essay Daily Advent is my favorite time of year. And I always appreciate the opportunity to read your work, Patrick.

Charles Dudley Warner wrote an essay "Christmas Past." It is in Harper's December 1884. It is more of a review of Christmas traditions in England. If you do not have access to it, let me know and I'll email you a copy. Andrew Petersen

William: Right you are! And how (unsurprisingly) shameful of me to forget that we discussed this years ago. Here's that Lamb essay: http://grammar.about.com/od/classicessays/a/A-Few-Words-On-Christmas-By-Charles-Lamb.htm It doesn't appear in his two main books (Essays of Elia and Last Essays of Elia), nor is it in my 1869 compilation Elia and Eliana. But it does appear in Essays and Sketches (1859), with the caveat that it is "presumptively the work of Lamb, but the fact of his authorship cannot yet be taken as fully established."

But thanks for reminding me. I'm tempted to revise the note above, but I should leave the mistake for posterity.

And Andrew: Thanks for that new essay. Here it is: http://www.unz.org/Pub/Harpers-1884dec-00003 I look forward to reading it.

The plot thickens: William McDonald, the editor of The Works of Charles Lamb (vol. IV, 1903), wrote in a note to the essay, "When I decided to include ["A Few Words on Christmas"], I was of the opinion that though the entire article could hardly be by Lamb (I take it to be Hood's), yet Lamb had a hand in it, and that the description of the Beadle, which stands out markedly from every other part of the article, was most probably his. I feel more doubtful of that now. All we know is that Lamb sent a little contribution to Hone, the one object of which was to have this passage about the Beadle transferred (by way of quotation) to the pages of the "Every Day Book." I will therefore quote here the little contribution entire, with its bright imbedded quotation, and its picture; these appeared in the "Every Day Book" for January 28, 1826."

"Hood" is Thomas Hood, a "sub-editor" of London Magazine and a minor poet.

Here is the "Every Day Book" from January 28, 1826:http://www.honearchive.org/etexts/edb/day-pages/393-jan28.html

Meanwhile, I gotta get back to work. I look forward to picking up this trail of clues later, and I welcome other loupes to help in the investigation.

What do you think McDonald is saying, above? That he's ultimately convinced that the essay IS Lamb (mostly or all)? Or that he's not even sure the Beadle passage was Lamb? What does "I feel more doubtful of that now" mean? What part does he doubt?

BTW, "Hone" is William Hone, a 19th-C muckraker/writer who from 1826-1829 published a series of books--Every-day Book, Table Book, and Year Book--with daily entries. I found a combined volume of the first two with the subtitle "or, Everlasting calendar of popular amusements, sports, pastimes, ceremonies, manners, customs, and events, incident to each of the three hundred and sixty-five days, in past and present times; forming a complete history of the year, months, and seasons, and a perpetual key to the almanac ... for daily use and diversion," which sounds delightful. Apparently he had Lamb's assistance with the endeavor.

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